


extant

by milkywayes



Series: spirit and string [1]
Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: (of sorts), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Hero of Hyrule - Freeform, Light Angst, Relationship Study, Retelling, but that doesn’t mean he remembers nothing, link doesn’t remember what anyone wants him to, we’re knee-deep in metaphors here and we love it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:00:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21675640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milkywayes/pseuds/milkywayes
Summary: He knows he is an almost-there, a shadow hinting at a person, a thing past its time come apart at the seams. But most of all he is lonely.
Relationships: Link & Zelda (Legend of Zelda), Link/Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Series: spirit and string [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1686754
Comments: 16
Kudos: 102
Collections: along_those_lines's favorites





	extant

**Author's Note:**

> I poured all my love and all my feelings about Breath of the Wild into this. 
> 
> When I started writing it, I realized that everyone and their mother has read about the memories Link recovers in the game and that I didn’t want to repeat that. Instead, I took the opposite route—what if he remembers nothing, niet, nada? What would that mean for his sense of self? Would he be more aware of the spirit of the Hero if he didn’t have memories of recent events there to distract him from it?
> 
> I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Let me know what you think, if you want! I’d love to hear from you.

Obeying comes as naturally as the swell and fall of his chest.

He opens his eyes.

He takes the strange device with the even stranger name, puts it where he’s told, carries its weight like he’d carry an extant organ in his fist or a pouch in his belly.

She tells him he is the light—to shine, whatever that means for this body, these muscles that ache with disuse. He looks for guidance, gazes up at the sun in the sky and then squints when it blazes back and then frowns when the sting comes and there are no tears to ease it. When he looks back down at himself, blinking, all he sees is the great white orb burnt into everything else—his feet, the grass, the blackened castle that she hails from—and it stays that way for a great, painful while. He puts _shining_ at the very bottom of his list and doesn’t try again.

He knows, in ways that he knows little else, that this body is not what it once was. He chafes against his confines and that is the first thing that strikes a place of familiarity inside him: a sensation lost and rediscovered, the discomfort of life enduring past its borders.

 _One hundred years,_ she says, and he finds no voice with which to correct her. There is gravel where his throat should be. He accepts this for the time being and allows her the mistake, grants her the error by which she has judged the scale of time that he walks on.

Ribs poke out of his sides like new teeth through pale gums. He hurts and he rumbles and then he eats eats eats. He sleeps very little.

The soles of his ill-fitting boots wear through within the week; after that, it’s his bare feet that drag raw and red against the earth. The skin hardens where it can, scabs where it can’t, asserts itself into every waking thought until he deems it wise to forgo thinking altogether.

She told him to remember and he takes what muscle memory he has and runs with it, knowing that’s not what she _meant_ but that it’s all he can give her and so he will.

Every sword in his grip is like a foreign limb unfit to replace whatever was there before it. He knows not its name, only its phantom weight and the irritation that comes with the strain of adjusting his wrist each time he swaps one blade for another. A comfort lost, a comfort missed, the way he imagines it would feel to miss a boulder upon the back or a lifelong friend’s touch. He rolls with it. Rolls out of his enemies’ paths, sweeps low underneath their strikes, wields whatever steel he is given with purpose—with speed—to minimize the time he spends holding it, living off of borrowed flesh—steel—just _steel_ after all, lifeless by comparison.

It’s a lesson in disappointment. It’ll be a while before he learns it.

He’s half-sure he’s learned it before.

*

Impa tells him to remember and when he tries, he does it wrong. He gives sleep another go and comes out of it slow and hoarse, impressions of places sticking to him like dirt he can’t wash off, like he needs better soap and a hand to help him reach. But there are no hands besides his own in all the land, it seems. No fingers that know to curl like his do, to hold on like his do, to do as needs to be done. He is in no place to dispute this. His hands itch to move and if others’ don’t, then there is nothing he can do about that.

The pictures in the slate are wrong. His mind is not empty—far from it—and it is that not-emptiness that looks at the land and feels no recognition. It opens its maw and wails, loudly, so that he has no choice but press his lips together and keep them that way, lest it rips out of him in place of words, alerts the others to his nature.

He trudges up one mountain and comes back down another with two more cracks added to the scablands of his chest, several more nicks in his poor excuse for a sword, and in his arms, the heavy load of things he’d never said to her. _That’s_ what he recalls, the _not_ of it, the intentions lost in-between somewhere, left to collect dust until he stumbles upon them, breaks his toes against them, context left behind for the wind and the fire and the frost to find.

“You are the sun,” he’d once not-told her, “the glare from up above, the ground searing my feet, the flicker in my vision.”

It doesn’t sound much like a compliment to him, now, and maybe it wasn’t. Maybe that’s why he’d not said it. Maybe he is unkind in secret, a sharp tongue behind closed jaws. All the more reason to keep them that way.

His hands do as they’re told. Their motions are practice gone over into instinct. When he has the sense to be afraid, he leaves the strategizing to them.

He hears her less and less.

Her error isn’t hers alone, he learns. A hundred years—a long time to be gone by anyone’s estimation, surely, though not long enough to get the number quite so wrong, to account for the missing time that sits like a hole in him. There’s a string that’s wrapped tight around some intrinsic part of him that ties him back and back and back to some beginning he doesn’t remember but that should count anyways, that matters even in its absence. Their confidence in their miscalculation scrapes at him.

“You weren’t there for most of it,” he doesn’t say. “By the Three, how _could_ you have known me?”

He’s of half a mind to slice off his own foot and let them carbon-date the bone, except he’s not sure that’s a technology they remember or even one that _he_ does, and the odds of losing a fight stack up higher with every limb he reports missing. Best not to raise that number to two.

He discovers he is far less patient with anyone that isn’t her.

His silence serves him well.

*

Upon request, he bares most of his body to Robbie, who claims to know him better by the shape of his scars than by his face. It’s a notion that would make more sense to him if he weren’t more scar than skin, tissue split and regrown on top of itself, welts that start on one side of his torso and resurface on the other. There’s nothing to see there; he’s stopped searching for meaning in his body a long while ago.

He knows it’s elsewhere. Just beyond his grasp.

He knows it’ll wait.

He does as he’s told and searches for and finds the hidden nooks of the land, matches likeness to reality in the most elaborate game of pairs he suspects he’s ever played, hunting out that which was promised to him like a boar that he stalks, and stalks, and loses to the brambles anyway.

A traveller points out he stares at the horizon like it owes him something. He thinks that it might but that it’s a little late to cash in, in the scheme of things, and tells the man that he’s never been one for rewards.

It is only _after_ he stores the slate away, returns it to his body heat and his body to the camp site that it creeps up at him, ginger like a child that knows it’s not the one whose name was being called.

The tilt of a chin, its shape different from every angle. Light shining off of a crown of hair—fair, more or less, every time. A hand, reaching out or withdrawing. Words crowding in his mouth, each one carefully considered and then swallowed back down to live in him til the end.

Whenever that might come. _If._

Impa cries, and he finds it in himself to regret not just the state of him but every step he’s taken off the Plateau, where he still lived in everyone’s hopes and hypotheses instead of striding into their houses and dragging in new grief for them to stack atop their old one.

Impa asks him to keep trying, if not for his own sake then for _hers_. He doesn’t know how to explain that while the wilds may speak to him, they never speak of this. He knows the girl in the castle and yet he doesn’t. He doesn’t know the shape of her but he can guess at an approximation of it, can draw up parameters and deliberate a shade of gold, the strength of touch. He’s neither a scientist nor a scholar but she is always an exception, a rule onto herself. All he does is follow it.

He leaves Kakariko for Hateno, leaves Hateno for the wilds, skirts one big circle around Lurelin and finds himself ankle-deep in blistered, sweaty misery outside sandstone walls. A thrum hangs in the air as skin stretches fiery-red across the backs of his hands. The baking dunes around him, painted the same color as the hair on his head, curl and undulate before the towering sun. It’s not before long that his hair forms its own prayers in sticky tangles against his neck. He understands that he’s never been the light, just that which sits beneath it.

*

He knows her name because it’s the one thing that stays—he knows his name because she told it to him. He imagines her, in the damp and the cold and the humidity, for naught; all he has are shapes and shades of gold and flax. If he were to build a woman out of them, he’d have to answer to the Three for his crimes long before he could ever hope to find her in the parts.

The flying minstrel comes and goes and he doubts there is rhyme or reason to why he goes where, when. There’s a higher mission that he speaks of, that has the corners of his beak shift upwards in a smile that betrays kindness rather than expectation. Recognition instead of remembrance. A knowing glint, restrained.

A stranger at Fort Hateno tells him of the Hero that gave his life in its defense. He imagines a red marker sticking out of the Plains, then another over the hills, another down the river, until there is no spot in the landscape left that hasn’t met his sacrifice in one way or another, and remains unmoved. He imagines his map, colored-in red.

Kass, he has come to learn, wields his lyric with purpose. It tugs at places that don’t like to be tugged at, boils the broth down to its essence. It’s a lot like having someone point out the very string and spirit that used to be his core and now is all he is. It makes his hands go clammy and his ears go hot and his feet take him away from there, more often than not.

He knows he is an almost-there, a shadow hinting at a person, a thing past its time come apart at the seams. But most of all he is lonely.

So when the wilds speak to him and urge him beneath their canopies, he listens. He follows.

He samples the shade of different trees, of cedars and palms and firs, though it pains him to step out of the sunlight while it’s so willing to warm the rough fabrics of his tunic and bring a new sting to the sunburn he has left untreated and glisten off the dewy grass beneath his thrice-mended boots.

At night, he hides in the crowns of oaks and birches and apple trees and lets stalkoblins bounce pebbles off their branches and his armored shins. He thinks of the ghosts he met in the machines and about how none of them spoke of the lack of recognition in his eyes when he looked at them. He thinks of how they gave him all they had left—of how they saw his own bare bones tied together by who-knows-what and lined it with what ghost flesh they could scrape up out of themselves.

*

He is soon distracted from the relief of it. A familiar ache returns to extend from the hand of his sword arm, his wrist flaring with a pain that he knows. It is not unlike the one which awakens in his chest if he thinks of how long it has been since her voice last spoke to him.

It takes him a while to follow the call, a while to sort through the not-saids and half-remembered glimpses in search of something at least a little constant among them to pitch his true north towards. He finds himself weaving between the hollowed trunks on muscle memory alone, the one thing he can trust, following a groove that he is as likely to have imagined as he is to have worn into the fog-choked moss below himself.

The path leads him into the heart of the land, and this place he knows like he knows the wire of his bows and the backside of his shields. It takes the breath right out of him and he thinks of every set of pairs he collected upon Impa’s behest which brought forth nothing, not even a fraction of the understanding each step he takes now settles into place inside him.

Its call thrums across the surface of his skin before he even sees it.

A beam of light centers it—of course it does.

The backs of his hands itch and burn.

The Hero trembles like a hollowed vessel ringing out when struck.

His fingers find the cloth-wrapped hilt warm to the touch. He feels the place where the metal bites into the stone pedestal as well as he feels anything, from the air against his face to the thud of his heart to the breeze in his hair.

 _Old friend,_ the Sword speaks and its bell toll slips directly into the tips of his fingers, into the tiny gaps between his teeth and between the ridges of his scars, _is it your spirit that has grown thin or is it the world around you?_

Water pricks at his eyes but doesn’t spill; the sensation itself is surprise enough. Wet lashes spread the damp to his cheeks as he blinks down at the blade of evil’s bane, chest tight. His fingers go clammy—he thinks of Kass.

He takes in a breath that shudders through the both of them and loosens them from the hilt.

He sinks to his knees.

There.

He presses his forehead to the blade.

A plea, a confession, a lump in his throat.

Cool upon contact, the metal warms faster than he could have wished for it.

“I don’t know,” he admits to the Sword but not to the air. His voice sounds tired in his own head. “You tell me. You always do.”

For a moment, he is still. Then he lifts himself off the stone and wraps both hands just above the crossguard and wills himself to try, at least _try_ , so that it may tell him.

It does.

It sears the ghost flesh right off his ribs with its touch, its weight hinox upon hinox upon hinox in his hands as it rips his only comfort out from under him, then takes one look at the bone laid out beneath it, gleaming from age and from many a gentle touch he’d _die_ to remember if he didn’t know his purpose and that he hasn’t served it yet and never will— _if_ —and it slides out of the stone once more.

*

The Great Deku Tree does not take long before he wakes, leaves rustling as branches tremble along with his voice.

There is no need for an introduction and the Tree does not give it. Instead, he looks and looks and looks.

The Sword remains warm under his touch, reflects and refracts the sunbeam so carefully placed upon them. It is blinding white one second and sky blue the next. He accumulates its weight into himself, boulder upon his back, the touch of a friend, and it settles into him as a tension in his shoulders in a moment between two breaths. He knows he’ll find its burden there at the edge of him where the two of them—Hero and Sword, Sword and Hero—overlap.

The Tree cannot gaze into him the way the Sword can.

The Tree sees that he knows him and assumes that he knows _her_ , too.

He remembers the tears streaming down Impa’s face—dropping onto the polished hardwood between them—and by Nayru, finds in himself the wisdom not to tell him.

“She has a smile like the _sun_ ,” the Tree says, as if that isn’t about the only thing he actually _knows_ , as if the red skin of his hands doesn’t burn sweet in the forest breeze with it. “I would do much to feel its warmth upon me once again.”

*

The Blatchery Plain stretches to meet the ridges and high plains on Necluda’s horizons. It sits wide, wet and waiting. There is no red marker for him and there never has been.

In its scabbard, the Sword stirs.

He could beg it to remind him, he supposes, though that would be like opening a book first on its epilogue or chiseling his own headstone and leaving blank the epitaph.

He’s more than that. He flutters in the wind like any old rag caught on a high branch but he feels his blood pulse through him now and he’s felt the sun on him and he is not without a friend.

He goes to sleep in a bed in an empty house. He tosses and turns—a hand, withdrawing and reaching out and withdrawing again; that hair, fair, more or less, every time—catching the light in a dark room and under the moon and when crusted with mud as if it’s easy, as if it just has to—a chin, different from every angle, and when it moves her voice sounds and when it doesn’t it stops and it’s never the same voice but it occupies the same space inside him, anyways.

He wakes. He cooks enough rations to feed all the town, feeds the town with half of it and keeps the rest for himself. When he feels empty, he touches the Sword. When it feels empty, it touches him back.

He can’t see the castle from here. They don’t speak of it, here. When he heads out and says, that’s where he’s going, they look at him like they’ve forgotten it exists.

There is no red marker for her, either.

He turns away before he hits somebody, takes the long way around Kakariko.

The ghost flesh grows back over time and he can’t decide if that’s just very kind of them or very sad. The Sword voices no opinion; it’s a friend to the true shape of him and uncaring about what clothes it. It knows his losses better than he does. They run like fissures through bone, mold through marrow. It cannot feel them but he can. He makes his own skin crawl.

*

The beast knows him but it doesn’t ask him to remember—it just wants him dead. Its red light blots out the sky and his steps crunch on the dried-out husks of what was once a sun-kissed garden. The black trees stand as memorials to themselves.

The castle looms. He glimpses at a time when there was neither a castle, nor a girl in it, though he knows there has always been a girl. She came first and he followed. Back and back and back, as it goes. Sometimes he wonders why it was _him_ and not somebody else. He holds no answers, only questions and choked-on confessions.

Air catches aflame around him as he dives out of sight of many a fire-shooting eye, two of the shields he brought already shattered and the last one indispensable. In his grip, the Sword _shines_. It’s the closest he will ever get to doing it himself.

The spires, those that are left, rise up into the heavens. The winding path leads him up until it doesn’t and he finds himself scaling the stone wall, wedging raw fingertips into gaps and cracks and willing himself to forget the weight of his body and that of his gear. He pulls himself up and up and over the edge to face down the next oozing minion that waits there.

Up and up and _up_ , feet dragging over bodies, stitches in his sides, to meet an end, whatever it looks like.

The beast roars until his ears ring and his head splits and the Sword sings for a taste of its black blood and by the Three, he’ll let it have its pleasure.

It splashes to the Sanctum flagstones like an overripe fruit, rot spurting this way and that, seeping into the cracks that widen under its deadweight. When they fall, they fall _deep_. The underbelly of the castle opens up below them. It shakes in its bedrock. _He_ shakes in his boots.

He feels her there. A spark of a presence in the murk and the gloom, a hint of light just over his shoulder, a shy warmth that tickles the very tips of his ears and the back of his neck.

The ghosts make sure to send the beast that killed them their regards.

His hands do as they’re told.

He knows all too well that no matter who wins here, they’ll end up doing it all again.

He knows it’s not _about_ them. Rather, it’s about everyone else, and what they leave behind for them to find.

*

Weakness doesn’t mellow the beast’s roars any. The ground shakes with them. He understands, he does; its voice is all it has left.

He flops down onto the morning-wet grass and presses out the breath that’s been clinging to his winded lungs for the past eternity. It leaves claw marks up his windpipe as it goes, and that hurts more than the gashes in his legs or the bruises that are forming or the twist in his knee.

A light brightens, brightens, brightens. His eyes squeeze shut against it. He’ll find her at the epicenter, cloaked in white and finishing her task now that he has finished his.

After all, after _everything_ , he finds that he is too afraid to look.

The Sword objects. The Sword loves her, has always loved her, and wants nothing more than to see her looking at it with pride.

It needs his eyes, it whispers, and its cadence jitters unpleasantly across his spine and underneath his bloodied fingernails.

He turns his face into the grass. Breathes in the petrichor, the dew, a bug or two.

 _Child of Farore_ , says the Sword. Rather pointedly.

“She knows who she chose,” he doesn’t say, “she won’t reconsider now.”

But he heaves himself up anyway. His feet threaten to give out from under him but once he stands, he stands, and will keep standing until something deigns to bowl him over.

His senses zero in on her faster than his eyes adjust to the changes in the light—bright white to dim to dimmer to all-but-gone. They’re left in the daybreak and she is the only thing that does not cast a shadow.

The beast is gone. They’re what remains.

She is the _sun_ and this time around, he doesn’t think she knows it.

She turns to face him. She brings warmth to his chest. She is the tilt of a chin in a heart-shaped face. The dawn glinting off a crown of hair as rich as yolk. A hand, limp at her side. She is green eyes and a smile that falters but stays.

He thinks he loves her each time a little differently.

She asks if he remembers her. He can see the way she fights to get the words out, like she fears the answer more than she feared the beast they slew.

He wants to say, “I don’t—but not for lack of trying. I’m not sure it matters at all.”

He wants to say, “You were the glare from up above, the ground searing my feet, the flicker in my vision. I followed you everywhere.”

She looks at him and waits. There are things that she needs to hear and things that she doesn’t, and they all crowd in his mouth and he _will_ consider them carefully.

He swallows the spit in his mouth and most of the words go down with it. Fights off the strain that has built up in his throat and ignores the steady trickle of blood inside the leg of his trousers. Casts off the ghost flesh, for it has done what it could.

She named him the Hero of Hyrule and he will be that if nothing else.

He smiles, says, “ _Zelda_ , I knew you even when I didn’t, and if you’ll let me, I’ll know you yet again.”


End file.
